The Miva Blog

New Bootstrap Framework for Miva Merchant

Over the past several months, we have been working internally on a responsive developer framework. The goal was to provide our development community a foundational framework to build responsive websites for their clients. When starting this project, we looked at everything that was currently on the market for existing responsive frameworks including Bootstrap, Foundation, and even building our own from scratch. Each framework has their own strengths and weaknesses and in the end we choose to build our Miva responsive framework on Bootstrap 3.0.

Bootstrap has a large developer base that already know and love Bootstrap and have built sites using its framework. We wanted to leverage that developer knowledge and make it as easy as possible for an existing Miva Developer and someone who is completely new to our platform to build a Miva Merchant store.

Besides Bootstrap’s responsiveness, it also has an incredible amount of built in “components” that for can be leveraged for building different parts of your website including: Dropdown Menus, Nav bars, Alerts and Sliders. A full list of these features can be found here: http://getbootstrap.com/components/ . These components standardize different features across your website and they do the heavy lifting for you so you are not constantly starting from scratch each time you need to build a homepage slider.

This framework was designed to be installed when building a new store from scratch. It requires you be using CSSUI and if you’re building any new Miva Merchant store you should be using CSSUI as your foundation anyway. While it can be used on a production site out of the box by adding a logo and a bit of styling, our vision for this goes much further. We hope developers use this as a starting point and implement their own custom designs on top of it. You can even purchase an existing Bootstrap 3.0 template and integrate its styles on top of this Framework.

We’re excited to see what creative uses the Miva Developer community comes up with and we would love your feedback to help improve the Framework. After all, this Framework is a tool for you, to help you build better websites, faster. This framework is also the first in a series of developer tools and frameworks we will be releasing over the next coming months. If you are building Miva Merchant websites, please make sure you fill out our developer survey so we can stay in touch.

The Miva Merchant Bootstrap Framework is completely free and can be downloaded here.